Prism”: Understanding Vygotsky’S Perezhivanie As an Ontogenetic Unit of Child Consciousness

International Research in Early Childhood Education 5 Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016 Finding the “prism”: Understanding Vygotsky’s perezhivanie as an ontogenetic unit of child consciousness Michael Michell University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Abstract The concept of perezhivanie, Vygotsky’s “last word” on psychology, has been among the most difficult of his theoretical constructs to define and operationalise in research. Drawing on close analysis of key texts, this article identifies and examines three defining attributes of perezhivanie found throughout Vygotsky’s works. The attributes are: perezhivanie as a prism of psychological development, as a unit of human consciousness, and as intelligent perception of one’s environment. In contrast with common understandings of perezhivanie as “emotional experience”, privileging it as affect, this article highlights the intellectual basis of perezhivanie in Vygotsky’s writings with particular reference to his notions of “generalised” and “intelligent perception”. The article argues that perezhivanie is best understood, psychologically, as an intellectual gestalt reflecting the intellectualisation of perception and, ontologically, as an apperceptual “organ of selection” of consciousness and personality “refracting” the child’s individual social situation of development. Key words Perezhivanie; Vygotsky; intellect; ontogenesis; personality; consciousness; gestalt ISSN 1838-0689 online Copyright © 2010 Monash University www.education.monash.edu.au/irecejournal/ International Research in Early Childhood Education 6 Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016 … unlike other disciplines, paedology does not investigate the environment as such without regard to the child, but instead looks at the role and influence of the environment on the course of development. It ought to be capable of finding the particular prism through which the influence of the environment on the child is refracted, i.e. it ought to be able to find the relationship which exists between the child and its environment, the child’s perezhivanie, in other words, how a child becomes aware of, interprets, and emotionally relates to a certain event. This is such a prism which determines the role and influence on the development of, say, the child’s character, his psychological development, etc. (“The problem of the environment”, Vygotsky, 1935/1994a, p. 341) Introduction Of all Vygotsky’s psychological constructs, the concept of perezhivanie—“experiencing”, or “lived through” or emotional experience —continues to elude clear conceptual and operational definition. The concept, introduced in a lecture some months before his death, was to be Vygotsky’s “last word” (Iaroshevskii, 1997, p. 70) on psychology, coming after an intense two year period of rapid theoretical changes and revisions that saw the introduction of key child development concepts such as the social situation of development, the zone of proximal development, and neoformations (Yasnitsky, 2011). Vygotsky’s early death meant that perezhivanie, as a key unit of child consciousness, remained “unfinished business” in his investigation of development of human consciousness in ontogeny (González Rey, 2007, 2009; Veresov, 2015a; Yaroshevsky, 1999). Vygotsky’s distinction between everyday (spontaneous) and theoretical (scientific) concepts (Vygotsky, 1934/1987c, pp. 167-241) provides a necessary starting point for understanding his concept of perezhivanie. The Russian word, perezhivanie, is derived from two root components pere, meaning “through”, and zhivat and zhiv, meaning “to live”. Perezhivanie therefore expresses an idea of “lived through” experience. In its everyday sense, “perezhivat meant to be alarmed, worried, upset; to suffer mental torment, to undergo some trial and survive it, having overcome the difficulties and troubles involved, to experience a state or feeling of and then outlive or vanquish it” (Vasilyuk, 1992, p. 9). Everyday understandings of perezhivanie are insufficient, however, as the word also acquired specialised meanings in Russian art and culture. Notably, it formed the theoretical core of the acting method of Vygotsky’s contemporary, Konstantin Stanislavski, which strived “to replace the art of portraying emotions by the art of living these emotions (perezhivanie)” (Vygotsky, 1923, as cited in Michell, 2015, p. 24) by eliciting a deep onstage psychological connection between character, actor, and audience. Within Stanislavski’s theoretical system, perezhivanie therefore acquired the specialised meaning of an actor’s “emotional (re)experiencing” of character that “infected” audiences (Stanislavski, 2008). It is this drama, role-play notion of perezhivanie understood as “intensely-emotional-lived-through-experience” (Ferholt, 2010, p. 164) that is represented in research on children’s play worlds (Ferholt, 2009, 2015). Arguably, this view of perezhivanie owes more to Stanislavski’s theoretical system1 than Vygotsky’s, since it ignores the fundamentally different “scientific” purposes the concept plays in the respective systems of the two theorists (Michell, 2015). The premise of this paper is therefore that Vygotsky’s perezhivanie needs to be understood as a key “scientific concept” (Vygotsky, 1934/1987c, p. 234) whose theoretical meaning is defined within his system of psychological concepts (Karpov, 2005). Perezhivanie is increasingly being used in studies of experience ranging from young children’s playworlds (Ferholt, 2009, 2015), lived experience of the everyday (Quiñones, 2013; Quiñones & Fleer, 2011), family migration (Adams & Fleer, 2015), emotional regulation (Fleer & Hammer, ISSN 1838-0689 online Copyright © 2010 Monash University www.education.monash.edu.au/irecejournal/ International Research in Early Childhood Education 7 Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016 2013a, 2013b), human identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a, 2014b; Nogueira, 2014), emotions in learning (Stone & Thompson, 2014; Vadeboncoeur & Collie, 2013), classroom discourse (Adams & March, 2014; Sannino, 2008), student academic engagement (Michell, 2012), art and drama (Connery, John-Steiner, & Marjanovic-Shane, 2010; Davis, 2015), language learning (Mok, 2015), science learning (Fleer, 2014; Schmidt, Lyutkh, & Shumow, 2012), assessment experience (Quiñones & Fleer, 2008), parent caregiver interaction (Brennan, 2014; Chen, 2015), and teacher cognition and learning (Cross, 2012; Dang, 2013; Golombek & Doran, 2014; Yang, 2015). Many of these studies emphasise the affective nature of perezhivanie as emotional experiencing without a clear connection to intellect or the development of human consciousness and personality. This affective privileging of perezhivanie may be attributed to researchers’ application of the Vygotsky Reader editors’ translation of perezhivanie as “emotional experience” in “The problem of the environment” (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1994). Although the editors acknowledge its intellectual dimensions2, their in-text translation “emotional experience” has become the standard meaning of the word. This paper argues for an “intellectual” reading of perezhivanie in Vygotsky’s works through his use of the “prism” metaphor, his focus on consciousness, and his notion of “intelligent” or “categorical” (Vygotsky, 1930-1931/1998b, p. 90), “generalised” or “meaningful perception” (1934/1987c, p. 190), which anticipated and framed the concept. Understanding perezhivanie involves a systemic analysis of Vygotskian texts relating the concept to its family of associated concepts within Vygotsky’s evolving system of thought (Karpov, 2005; Veresov, 2015a), together with an historical analysis tracing the lines of theoretical development from the construct’s earlier, embryonic conceptualisations. This textual approach to tracing the development of Vygotsky’s thinking therefore attempts a textual hermeneutic that takes Vygotsky’s words seriously (Gredler & Shields, 2004) and indeed mirrors the dynamic, developmental methodology Vygotsky himself applied to the study of changing psychological phenomena (Vygotsky, 1931/1997d). The opening quote of this paper provides the starting point for examining Vygotsky’s construct of perezhivanie and its web of related psychological concepts. The content of the excerpt is theoretically significant because of its link to the lecture’s overall theme of explaining paedology’s key task of investigating the role and influence of the environment on the course of child development, and its location and function in the immediate surrounding text. Coming where it does, the excerpt both synthesises key ideas about perezhivanie exemplified in the case studies of the preceding text and introduces the theoretical elaboration and application that follows. From the quote, three key defining attributes of perezhivanie and their respective lines of theoretical development are identified, elaborated, and supported with reference to Vygotsky’s writings. Firstly, Vygotsky’s conceptualisation of perezhivanie as a prism highlights its “refracting”, mediating role between child and environment and delineates its analytical value as a psychological system reflecting and revealing its personality and situation-specific aspects in a given social situation of development. Secondly, perezhivanie as a unit of consciousness involves an understanding of the key elements of the child’s psyche—conscious personality, character, and new psychological formations—and their role in the process by which the environment influences (positively or negatively) the course of the child’s development. Thirdly, the

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